SV is undergoing it's biggest transformation ever. The establishment is being formed, instead of tinkering in garages in sweatpants. This new corporate formulaic way of "staring up" protects their own elk, since the value created is often no longer in the product, but is rather based on connections, like in the East Coast old boys clubs.
Yup. And it's sickening to see people tout this model as some kind of "meritocracy". No, it's a system of privilege and connection, just like many others.
Gotta live in the bay area to start, that alone is a challenge unless you're already wealthy. Gotta know who to talk to and how to talk to get money. Gotta have a degree. Gotta have friends who can be your co-founders/early employees or connections. Gotta know how to look right to the angel investors and the VCs.
The idea that the average invested company represents anything more than a group of people with an in and a talent for schmoozing is easily refuted just by observation. Sure some of them have solid fundamentals, but most are bullshit.
There was a tweet, since deleted, a while ago by Ben Dreyfuss (son of Richard Dreyfuss) who is now a writer at Mother Jones. He was attempting to explain how everyone assumes his parents carried him and related the story of being given 140k by his mom to try to make it in Hollywood, after three years he ran out of money and gave up. That story, along with Trump's "small loan of a million dollars" is really not so different from the typical SV startup story. There are countless small companies who are given "small loans of a few million dollars" based on who they know and generally seeming like they aren't complete morons. And yet few in that system would draw a parallel to the sort of privilege and wealth of Trump's ilk, though substantially there are many similarities.
The folks in SV tend to dress down and avoid excess signs of luxury until they've "made it" proper, but it's not as far removed from rich parents giving their spoiled children cushy jobs in the family business as most people would hope.
But this is bound to happen whenever a region reaches a level of success. There will be incumbents who are enjoying their cushy positions which they rode into when the times were greater than ever (e.g. Boston Brahmins, people in 'company towns', early mom-and-pop/neighbor/Stanford-prof/etc. investors in SV companies like Google, FB, etc.). The children and proteges of the first couple of successful generations of Bay Area are now working age or older. They have their own networks formed in high school, neighborhoods, parents' companies and so on. I think this kind of establishment of an establishment starts once the first successful generation has children. One indicator of the 'establishment' is you have people using family connections- 'my dad's friend is the VP of blah blah,' etc.
